Greenbox: Captures Carbon Dioxide to Make Biodiesel

It sounds like three Welsh fishing buddies have developed the next best thing to a perpetual motion machine. The concept is thus: Fitted to car instead of an exhaust their Greenbox device traps carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. The box needs to be replaced about every full tank of fuel. "Through a chemical reaction, the captured gases from the box would be fed to algae, which would then be crushed to produce a bio-oil. This extract can be converted to produce a biodiesel almost identical to normal diesel." Voila! - driving your car produces fuel. After a couple of years of testing and umpteen hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in research it would appear that there is more to this than the usual magic solution that crosses our desks. Of course the devil is usually in the detail. None is which overly forthcoming at the moment, with Reuters noting that the trio (a biochemist and two engineers) don't even trust their wives with the info on how the Greenbox actually works. "After every demonstration they hide its individual components in various locations across North Wales and the technology is divided into three parts, with each inventor being custodian of one section." (Indiana Jones would be proud.) What we can glean from the story is that in the UK they would need 10 genetically modified algae (Mmmm?) factories, each about 400 hectares (~1,000 acres), to process the CO2 from Britain's 30 million cars. Still it's good to know there are yet more inquiring minds at work on our global conundrum. Via ::Reuters UK